Halloween is a natural time for Makers to show their skills, be it a simple but effective decoration or costume or something way over the top. I wanted a sound project so I had the choice of using a
Raspberry Pi or an
Arduino with a sound board. I chose Arduino with an
Adafruit Wave Shield as the programming is very straightforward, reading and outputting sounds via an SD card. The pumpkin is controlled using a
IR receiver to decode keys representing commands to the pumpkin. I chose IR over radio control for simplicity and time. The LED array is a
Larson Scanner kit from
Evil Mad Scientist - it can vary the scanning frequency and eye size.
The remote can select from five phrases and can mute/unmute the cylon eye sound.
I plan to reuse the Arduino/Wave Shield in upcoming projects, perhaps my robot/home automation project.
If you would like to see a video of it, go to Youtube at
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4gCXfIj1xyY
The sad thing overall: many of the younger folks in the office did not know what a cylon is. I thought it might be confusion over new Battlestar vs. old
vs
but that wasn't it - must be Geek vs. The Rest of Humanity :(
This project made the Adafruit Blog! https://www.adafruit.com/blog/2012/11/01/cylon-pumpkin-with-sound-effects/
ReplyDeleteIf anyone wants more details about construction before Christmas, post and I'll get it together.
Christmas?
ReplyDeleteI'll repurpose the parts before then. I didn't want to make the offer open ended in case someone two years from now wanted materials I no longer have.
DeleteI'm interested in the IR receive + wave playback combo... Would it be possible to get a copy of your code? Which Wave and IR libraries did you use and did you run into any conflicts (timers or pins, etc.) between them?
ReplyDeleteThanks for your interest Adam. I have posted the code in a public GitHub repository at https://github.com/TheKitty/CylonPumpkin
DeleteYou should get the WaveHC and WaveUtil libraries from adafruit.com. IRremote library by Ken Shirriff at http://arcfn.com. You should use one of the IRtest programs with Ken's library to discover the codes for
whatever remote you chose. I used an old Creative RM-1500 remote but you can use any remote and map the codes you discover to the keys you push. This project used number keys 1 to 6 for effects, mute to turn off sound, Volume + to turn it on. The code is not overly clean as there was a bug with the mute button so I ignored presses that turned
out to be just over 1.5 seconds. It was frustrating - you'll probably have better luck. The sounds can be found via Google "Cylon WAV". I cannot post the sounds as they may be copyrighted.
I'll post some build pictures with pin connections to match the code.
The details are now posted at http://21stdigitalhome.blogspot.com/2012/11/cylon-pumpkin-build-details.html
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